


The Gift of Túrin

by SpaceWall



Series: By the Responsibility for Our Future [2]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: But also, Established Relationship, F/M, Families of Choice, Family Drama, Friends to Lovers, Grief/Mourning, Home, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Sibling Love, post-Dagor Dagorath
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-29
Updated: 2019-11-29
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:27:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21606046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpaceWall/pseuds/SpaceWall
Summary: In a remade world, Finduilas and her family seek a better life. As they build a home for themselves, slowly but surely, they find one.Bittersweet, but heavy on the sweet.
Relationships: Beleg Cúthalion/Finduilas Faelivrin, Beleg Cúthalion/Finduilas Faelivrin/Mablung of Doriath/Gwindor/Túrin Turambar, Beleg Cúthalion/Mablung of Doriath, Ereinion Gil-galad & Finduilas Faelivrin, Finduilas Faelivrin/Gwindor, Finduilas Faelivrin/Mablung of Doriath, Finduilas Faelivrin/Túrin Turambar
Series: By the Responsibility for Our Future [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1557175
Comments: 18
Kudos: 47





	The Gift of Túrin

**Author's Note:**

> This is (in highly edited form), Aranya’s original epilogue, all the way from when this story had only like 3 POVs. I think I’ve made it fit with current Aranya continuity, but thematically, it may be a little off. Still, sweet I think. 
> 
> CW/TWs: past character death, referenced canonical traumas, referenced canonical sibling incest, referenced canonical suicide. Basically the sort of shit you might expect from people who’ve been through what Finduilas, Túrin, Gwindor, Beleg and Mablung have been through in canon. But nothing graphic. 
> 
> There is also one warning that is very spoiler-y, but see endnotes. 
> 
> I promise this story is sweeter and more innocent than those warnings make it seem.

They woke up together, and alone. It would become clear later that most elves woke in larger groups, as the first elves did, but perhaps because of Túrin’s nature, they woke up, just the five of them, on the bank of a curving, silver river. It was clean water, and cool, cutting a course as though it had always been there, rather than having been called into being by their raised voices.

Finduilas had been so relieved to see them all together that she had wept, tears streaking down her face. Gwindor, overcome with sudden anger at Beleg’s self-sacrifice, at his callous manipulation of Túrin, had hit him in the jaw. He hadn’t been nearly so angry before, but something about seeing Túrin for himself, the way he sometimes flinched away from their touch as if his own flesh were poison, was entirely too much. 

It was very hard. Not the living off the land, but the living together. Beleg and Mablung were among the finest hunters ever born, and they and Túrin had lived long, wild years in Doriath. This calmer, tamer world was nothing to them. Gwindor and Finduilas, revealing their more Noldorin nature, began to build. They sung wood and carved stone into first a small shack, and then, slowly, a house in its entirety. There was no need for defences, and so they built none. Yet, with all this ease, they found conflict. Túrin was terribly afraid of himself. Finduilas sometimes found herself afraid of him, too, even though she knew it was not rational. Other times, guilt for the death of Túrin’s father robbed her of sleep for days. Beleg surprised them all with an odd jealous streak. Before they’d built their home, cold in their sleeping conditions had been a trigger for Gwindor. Each of them had their struggles, diminished by the remaking of the world but never completely gone.

In spite of all this struggle, things began to come together. Slowly, at first, and then quick, they found an easy rhythm. Finduilas found herself falling back in love with Túrin. The care with which he carried his strength had always been attractive, and she saw it more now. He was less angry at himself than he had once been, even if he was more afraid of his own actions. The absence of his curse filled him with wonder, and this made her smile. She wanted to share it with him. Beleg made amends for what he’d done, in private moments shared only with Túrin at first, and then more broadly to each of his lovers. Finduilas and Mablung, having shared the bloody violence of the battle itself, grew as close as they had ever been. Her love for him was less dramatic and wild than for Túrin and Beleg, but no less powerful. Of all of them, he was the steadiest, the most unflappable and good. He helped Gwindor talk about the ways this new battle had brought the trauma of the first age back into sharp focus and, in this world where the song was cleaner and brighter, begin to remove the worst of the pain. All of them, in all their myriad combinations, wove their way towards a healed and better connection than they had ever had before. 

It was months after all of this, when their shack had become a house had become a home, that they had their first visitor. 

Gil-galad came first, for Finduilas, and he brought with him Gelmir. There were others in their party – Gil’s son Elladan, Mablung’s mothers – but it was Gil-galad who had led them. His connection to Finduilas had always been strong, but the way she had fought to sing him back into the song had made them almost as one being, and his awareness of where she was was strong indeed. 

While Elladan and Túrin discussed mortality, Gwindor and Gelmir held each other close and released their shared anxieties into the wind. Mablung and his mothers took Beleg with them, and they took a many-day trip upstream, discussing this changed and reborn world. They two had long been living with the Avari, and now were followers of the Remade Triarchy, but before that, ages upon ages past, they had loved Beleg as well as they loved their own son. Their presence was an unexpected blessing, and Mablung did not quite have the words to say how grateful he was for it.

Finduilas and Gil-galad ranged too, but not nearly as far. They didn’t want to leave Elladan and Túrin unsupervised for too long. Finduilas had rarely in her first life had the opportunity to walk freely through a forest, and in the second, she had lived with the tamed forests of Valinor. Now, she carried a bow with her, but there was no real threat. They walked slow and were long quiet. There was so much to say, and it was so hard to do.

In the end, Gil-galad broke the silence. “Elrond told me what you did.”

Finduilas found her heart was racing in her chest, and didn’t know why or how to stop it. “He shouldn’t have been able to. He slept through most of it.”

“Well,” he amended, “Maglor told him.”

Finduilas closed her eyes, and found the smell of her brother’s blood strong still, the slickness of the sweat that had concentrated on her own palms. In reality, Gil-galad’s hands came up to touch her shoulders. 

“Thank you for looking after him.” He pulled her close, running fingers through her hair. He was alright. He was absolutely fine. 

“How is he?” Finduilas needed to think about something, anything else.

They continued their walk, and Gil-galad recounted in great detail waking up with his spouses in a great crowd of people. Neither of their sons had been directly with them, but Elladan had been in the same clearing. Elrohir was further afield, but the messages they’d heard suggested that he was well watched under the careful eyes of his grandmother, the widowed Queen Elwing. 

“Beleg and Mablung will be glad to hear that she is not alone.” What Elwing had done was so terrible, but there had been no other choice. Gil-galad, who was much in Finduilas’s brain, could have discerned the truth of the murder, but he stayed away from it. Elrond didn’t want to know which one of them had killed him. 

In the politics of the world, there had been much change. Fëanor – Istima, as a Vala, by Indis’s sight – had taken Melkor’s place as the Lord of Fire, the Master of Changings and Endings Without End. At his side sat Nerdanel, Lady of Frozen Things. There had been other elevations to the blessed ones also. Elrond had declined a position as Fëanor’s advisor, but both Galadriel and Nimloth had accepted. It was purportedly difficult to tell which of her kin had been most shocked by this, but Celebrían, according to Gil, was making a strong case for the least surprised. 

“So, who’s which of the old maiar?” Finduilas asked. 

Gil-galad shrugged. “Most of them aren’t one-to-one. Well, of Melkor’s folk anyway. So many of them were corrupted beyond purpose that they were impossible to identify. The two new maiar of Aulë are more obviously Sauron and Saruman, although it’s sometimes difficult to say which is which. I knew both Celebrimbor and Narvi before, and I’m not sure exactly what’s changed in them. I think Celebrimbor is meant to be Sauron, but he left the purview of the wolves back in Oromë’s capable hands, so who’s to say? Narvi doesn’t have Saruman’s arrogance, to Elrond’s eyes, but as a dwarf he wouldn’t.”

It was good that Aulë had elevated one of his children. It should not have been only Eru’s firstborn who deserved the chance to make their mark in this new song. “So, when they aren’t corrupted, what do Melkor’s people… do, exactly?”

He explained it to her thus: “They manage cold and heat as Ulmo manages tides and rivers. Long these went unmanaged, or managed by the cycles of moon and sun, but now, they can be run properly, as designed. I don’t fully understand it, but Elrond swears up and down it’ll make sense eventually. There’s more, too. Melkor was… the grindstone against which the other valar sharpened themselves. He was change through strife and defeat. He was, as men so succinctly put it, the ‘human’ sort of fallacy. That too, I believe, Fëanor intends to recognize in some way. How, exactly I have no idea.”

They stayed a good long while, Gil and his folks, and left only to be replaced by other guests soon after. Their home had grown again, with the help of visiting Noldor, absorbing guest rooms and myriad other features. The Sindar among them built a garden. 

Queen Elwing made it down to visit, with Finduilas’s other nephew. In their shared guilt, she and Mablung and Beleg held each other. Finduilas’s father came, and a remarkably penitent and silent Argon. Nimloth, brimming with power, appeared one morning out of the rising, ethereal light of these new heavenly spheres – like the trees, almost, but suspended in the sky like a hanging flower basket. The power hadn’t changed her, all that much. In character she was precisely the same, and the only real aesthetic change had been the addition of a crown of glowing embers. They looked far too much like silmarils. 

“We debated it,” she explained, “which of us would favor cold and which heat. It’s not quite like they’re saying, that Nerdanel is a maia and Fëanor a Vala. They’re more like two halves of one Vala. And besides, most of that work is done by non-sentients or lesser maiar who didn’t really change. We mostly have that as a secondary concern to our roles as they are meant to affect the song itself, and those who sung it. But in the end we decided that all those who had faced the ice would choose first. Galadriel picked that, which, since she and I were on the same track as advisors, made me the fire one.”

She’d come because they too were old friends, of course, and she had known Túrin also, ages and worlds earlier. Yet she was also there with a purpose. To ask permission for something. 

“I know what you did,” she said, to Beleg and Mablung. “It wasn’t so hard to know, once I gained my portfolio and realized that I had become, among other things, the representative for all those who’ve lost children beyond reckoning. I’ve received Elwing’s permission to tell Idril, but I won’t go forward without yours.”

They asked her why. It had been their intent to never tell, and indeed, they had not wanted to, but Beleg and Mablung gave their consent once Nimloth had explained. 

“I spent a thousand years wanting to know why, and I never will. Even as a maiar, this knowledge remains firmly in the hands of slow-healing Mandos and weeping Nienna. Idril knows the grief of losing one she loves to death. She won’t blame you for what Eärendil chose, but she deserves to know why he had the chance to choose it.”

Beleg and Mablung consented, reluctantly, and only because Elwing already had. Nimloth went away again, leaving behind her the faint smell of sulfur and a haze in the air. 

After this, they finally had a few months alone. Finduilas and Túrin, after long discussions of all that had passed between them, several sweet gifts, and a little encouragement from Gwindor, resumed a romantic relationship. She thought he had almost forgiven her for the death of his father, and he thought that she had almost forgiven him for being turned into a symbol of all that she’d lost. They weren’t in love, not yet, but they were gentle with each other, they shared touch in a familiar, easy way. 

Then Idril came to visit. She came alone, which was a mercy. Her father would not have been so understanding. Turgon ever, to Finduilas’s memory, had cared more for justice than need. As for Tuor, he would have ever been welcome, for he was as much kin in their household as his wife, but he had more mortal rage, mortal grief, and that would have been difficult for Beleg and Mablung. 

Surprisingly, it was not with them she spoke. Instead, she called Finduilas to her, and they sat on the riverbank. 

“I forgive you,” she said, after a time. “You must have known, have been in their heads when it happened, but I don’t blame you. You were focused on Túrin.”

Really, only Elwing and Beleg were to blame. And possibly Nerdanel, although that seemed unfair. One to kill him, and two to let him pass beyond the sphere of this world. It seemed that even now, he was gone beyond this world, beyond the planes – flattened again, after millenia – that composed it. 

Quietly, Finduilas said, “that doesn’t make it any better. None of this should have happened. Varda shouldn’t have–” She choked herself with the magnitude of what she was trying to express.

After some months of thought, Finduilas blamed Varda for everything that had befallen them more than any of her kin. Ulmo, Aulë, Vána and Oromë had all been actively on their side. Nessa, Yavanna and Tulkas had done them no wrong. Vairë, Irmo and Nienna had all been helping them in secret. Really, the only possible culprits were Námo, Varda, and Manwë. Manwë, she had decided, was mostly just a fool. He was like Ingwë or Findis. He didn’t understand any of this. But he wasn’t malicious. There were too many stories of his eagles aiding those of Beleriand and Middle Earth to think him malicious. Even Maedhros could attest to the contrary. Námo was malicious, but in a calculating way. He thought he knew what was best for everyone, and knew, as Túrin was fond of saying, that to eat eggs, one first had to crack the shells. Varda wasn’t like that. Her intentions and her outcomes hadn’t been good for them, in the end, no matter how the Sindar loved her. 

“No,” Idril agreed, “she shouldn’t.” There was another long silence. “Fëanor – Istima, as he is a Vala – wants to do something called a ‘mediation’. That’s Maglor’s word for it, anyhow, and I assume it was his idea. As far as I can tell, he wants to make all the valar sit down with those who hold grievances against them, and he, Estë and Námo are meant to help them work out their differences.”

“What if I have a grievance with him or Námo?”

The corners of Idril’s lips quirked up. “I suppose that’s what Estë is for.”

It was still an odd combination, but it made a certain sense. Námo the Judge. Tough, but not untempered. Estë the Healer. Nienna would have been a more conventional choice, but she would obey her brother’s judgement, within reason. Besides, healing and pity were not always compatible. And then Fëanor. Fëanor, who now stood to represent elves before the Valar, for better and for worse. Fëanor, who had given to the song suffering, and change, growth of the person and healing of wounded souls. 

Sometimes, very rarely, neither of the Spheres would rise in the night, and only the stars would be visible. On those nights, Finduilas and Beleg would go out and listen for the music. They made a game of it, feeling out the additions and the differences. Sometimes, it was even clear who had done what, down to an individual singer. It was, for an elf, more temporal than Valinor had ever been, and that, they were sure, belonged to the men and half-men who had sung with them. Surely, the spheres themselves were a combination of the memory of the trees and the knowledge of the moon and sun. Yet Beleg thought – and Finduilas agreed – that the greatest change to the song was that which came from Fëanor himself. 

Melkor – for he had been Melkor, once – had given the first song terrible pain, but he had also made it better. This, and their terrible power, were the respects in which he and Fëanor had always been alike. Melkor had forced Manwë into kingship as Fëanor had Fingolfin. Melkor had given Nienna her purpose, had helped her craft the sorrow of the song. Winter had made Spring sweeter, darkness had made the stars brighter. Fëanor had, somewhat inadvertently, reunited the sundered peoples of the elves. The challenge provided by Fëanor and his sons had given elvenkind their greatest leaders. Fingolfin and Finarfin, Fingon and Gil-galad, and, in the end, fierce Nimloth and forgiving Elwing, and summer-sweet Elrond. Now, as a Vala, Fëanor had altered the cruelty of Morgoth’s challenge, his darkness, into something that was no softer, but far more receptive. It was a work in progress that would last as long as the world did, transmuting itself as it did all other things. 

“It doesn’t seem like enough,” Finduilas finally said.

Idril sighed. “It won’t be. But Eärendil isn’t here to tell her that it was cruel, and someone needs to. She–” Idril paused, eyes flicking upwards towards the brighter of the spheres. “I think the worst part is, she really trusted him. Some part of her may even have loved him. I don’t think she understood that in her every action she was caging him, tearing apart his fëa. Someone needs to tell her, and I’m the only one left who can.”

It was so awful. Speaking for all the myriad people who were part of her, husband and lovers, and even Gil-galad, she said, “we would speak with you, if you want. If you think she might listen.”

Idril seemed to consider it. “That is a generous offer. But no more rebels for now, I think. Varda is much wary of us. No, Tuor, Elwing and I will face that alone.”

“Elwing?”

“Yes,” murmured Idril, words difficult to listen to, “I knew Elwing had done it the second I saw him fall. I just didn’t understand that anyone else did.” It was obvious she had more yet to say. “It had to be Elwing, because nobody else was close enough to him to feel what I did. When he was up there, Eärendil knew what had to happen. He wanted to die. He was–” Her voice broke, but she didn’t stop. “He was thinking about Maedhros, on Thangorodrim. He just kept thinking about it. I didn’t realize he meant to go beyond. I didn’t know that. I don’t think Elwing did, either. We just thought he wanted to be free, and neither of us are so resilient as Fingon. Besides, the oaths and duties that bound him would never have allowed him to simply give the silmaril away, and Fëanor needed it. If he hadn’t held the three, we would all have died.”

Oddly, Finduilas’s thoughts went to her brother-in-law. How terrible, that so much of his family had been made to suffer so. If you considered Maglor’s exile a captivity, the three of his fathers had lived a combined time as prisoners greater than any elf had ever lived at all. 

“Why are you telling me this?” Finduilas asked. Her and Idril had never been truly close, for all they had in common. 

Idril shrugged. “In part, because I need to tell someone, but greater than that – you know what it is to love someone who has gone beyond, who has suffered such torments, who has inflicted such harm on themselves, and you have healed. Speaking to you reminds me that it is possible to survive this.”

Finduilas had survived because she had known that Túrin was coming back, and because she had rarely been out of the company of those who shared her grief. In time, she had healed, and had changed so much that the elleth who had first fallen in love with Túrin, a thousand lifetimes ago, was but a fragment of her being. You couldn’t do that with the loss of a child. 

Finally, she pulled her answer from Gil-galad’s mind. “You should talk to your grandson,” she said. “His daughter chose to take the mortal path, and he knows what it is to watch someone you love tear themselves apart.” Then, for herself, she added, “and you should know that what he did, going after Námo, was a better valour than I have ever seen or known. It was generous.”

If Beleg had done it instead, she never would have forgiven him. Having a hand in permanently killing one of their lovers would have destroyed Túrin utterly, and leaving such cruelty as his last legacy would have ever tarnished Beleg’s memory. If it had been Nerdanel, Fëanor would have torn Námo apart for daring to live in her place. She had been there by happenstance, barely a party to the war at all, and his anger would have been righteous indeed. But it had been Eärendil, no less loved than they, and as such, the burden fell to Idril. 

The silence was long before Idril said, “you know–nobody has ever called it that before.”

Emboldened, Finduilas affirmed, “it was. It should never have been necessary, but under the circumstances, it is impossible to say that he did not do good.”

She stood in profile, and as the light caught the line of her jaw, the bridge of her nose, she looked so very much like her son. “It was. I only wish that it had been possible for him to be happier before then.”

Then, like a trick of the light, Lady Nimloth appeared, and they were both gone. 

It was only after this that Túrin’s family finally, finally, made themselves known. They were the last to do so. Finduilas, who was not especially close with her parents, had seen Gil-galad and her nephews, which had been enough to fill her with such love for her kin. Mablung had been reunited with his mothers, and Beleg, who had never had blood kin as such, had been able to speak to Nimloth and Elwing, to Mablung’s mothers who had ever loved him. But Túrin family had been conspicuous in their absence.

In the end, it was Niënor who came first, with one of Oromë’s hounds as guide. The lesser-maia was courteous to a fault, a flawless guest who had introduced no quarrels into their home. Niënor, by her very existence, was less so. 

What had passed between her and Túrin was their business, much resolved in death. To the extent they spoke of it, these conversations were private. 

“Truly,” Túrin told them, once she had gone as swift and mysteriously as she had come, “I think the only part she really resents is being forced to return. Senses and memory united, she loves Brandir, and he wasn’t counted under Námo’s initial rule. She says that really, other than me, the only one of them happy to be here is Lalaith.”

Beleg, who was holding their all-too-mortal partner in his lap, pressed a kiss to the back of Túrin’s neck. “So, what then of Niënor and your mother? Will they pass on again, in time?” Will you?

The question was in all their minds, but none of them had to voice it for Túrin to answer, “I don’t know. I presume so. But as long as I, like Tuor, can choose otherwise, I do. I choose this world.” I choose you. “And who knows. Perhaps Námo’s own ordeal beyond this world will have softened his judgement some.”

For her own sake, and for Idril’s and those of all who loved mortals, Finduilas hoped that he was right. 

The thing about Túrin family was that, like Finduilas’s own, its boundaries were not always best defined by blood. Túrin and Niënor had never known each other as siblings, and Lalaith had barely known him at all. If they had become more familiar outside the circles of this world, none of them remembered it. With the exception of Morwen, who had come next and had been kind to Túrin but hostile to the rest of them, the family with whom he had shared the most, the sweetest, time was composed of Melian and Thingol. 

They came out of the woods one morning together, quiet and composed. Finduilas had never met Melian as Queen of Doriath, but Beleg and Mablung had showed her. This Melian looked less like that. She was more elven, less terrible, perhaps less powerful. She seemed diminished. 

Gil-galad had shown her Melian’s treachery. Finduilas had not felt the wound personally, but Beleg and Mablung had. They had followed Melian loyally, and she had been disloyal to them. 

They greeted them together. None of them had any formal attire – they had never needed it – but Finduilas wished for it more than anything when she saw the King and Queen. Still, she did her best, holding her head high and her posture steady. Mablung took her hand. It was he who spoke first. 

“Thingol,” he said, “Melian, welcome to our home.”

Years as Elwing’s friend, as consort to a Princess of the Noldor, had made Mablung far less invested in titles and crowns. But this went beyond that. This was a direct refusal to bow to them. Thingol was no King here, and never would be. 

Thingol did not look at him. His eyes searched with disdain across their still-young flowerbeds and the sometimes amateurish craftsmanship of their home. 

Melian greeted them each by name. “Mablung. Beleg. Finduilas. And I assume this is Gwindor?” She did not deign to call them by their titles either. This was war. 

And then Túrin, hand slipping free from Beleg’s went to Melian and grasped her hands. “My Lady,” he said, with the finest of his mortal charm. “I heard about what happened to your home, and to Dior your grandson. I am sorry.”

She never wept. Finduilas didn’t know if she could, but she bowed her head and was still a long while. She seemed to diminish again until she was little more than a mortal woman, and no taller than Túrin himself. She pressed her forehead against his. Where their hands were joined seemed to grow dazzlingly bright. 

Beleg looked to Thingol. “What’s happening?” He demanded, as a soldier. 

Thingol turned the full force of his regal heritage on them. It was dazzling. Then he stopped, and seemed as reduced as his wife. “It has been suggested,” said the elvenking, “that ways are open to us that once were not. ‘Lord Istima’ has convinced Námo that without Melkor’s touch, Eru never would have forced any of his gifts before nor after their time.”

They were leaving. Perhaps to seek out the daughter they once had lost. But they were leaving the closest thing they had ever had to a son behind. Melian drew back her hands, and the light remained with Turgon, clinging to his palms like dew to a blade of grass. 

“I don’t understand.” He sounded in that moment so very young. The light began to sink into his palm, running up the veins in his arms and sinking into his heart.

Melian reached up to stroke his cheek. “I am not leaving yet, little one. But I will, and to do so, I must shed the trappings of that which I was in the last song. This iteration is not for me. It is for you, Eru’s younger children. For now, I go elsewhere, to see what Father has built beyond this plane.”

Mablung said, “I didn’t realize that path was open to you.”

Her hand had drifted lower, resting just at Túrin’s jaw. His mouth was faintly parted with shock. 

“He has never kept from that path any who are truly prepared to seek it. It is, after all, a gift.”

She thought of Maedhros and Elwing, Túrin and Niënor, seeking death as an end. But Melian must have picked up on that, for she said, 

“Daughter of Orodreth, I said all who were prepared. Those who go at the end of their stories, not those who seek the end while the melodies still play for them.”

Túrin hugged his foster-mother. For the first time in their two lifetimes, Finduilas could feel Túrin’s mind against hers. It was rough as stone, his forms of communication unpolished by centuries of practice as those of elves were. 

“I’m going to miss you,” he said, and Finduilas could feel his grief in her heart. It was awful, and yet the closeness of it made her eyes water. She was so glad to have him occupy a place in her mind equal to Beleg and Mablung, equal to Gwindor. And now they weren’t going to lose him. 

“And I you, my son,” Melian said. When she pulled back, she was no more than a woman, a little shorter than Túrin, with long black hair that lay flat against her back and draped like fabric over her curves of her body. Túrin, who had a decent eye for these things, would have placed her age at about forty, and there was grey at her temples. Symmetrical lines of tears and laughter were carved into her still-perfect face. Thingol took her hand in his own. He looked almost the same, but there was something inexpressibly less about him also. 

Túrin’s dark hair had blackened, the mortal roughness of his skin had smoothed. The marks from mannish puberty across his face had faded, though they were still present in ghostly sliver, embossed as much upon the spirit as the body. This was the form in which he knew himself. With the faux surety of someone who had watched an art practiced a thousand times, he raised a hand to the sky and whistled. His fist was half-closed, knuckles pointed up, and in time, a nightingale lighted on his hand. 

The smile Melian gave at this was a proud one. Beleg pursed his lips and whistled a mimicry of the bird’s song to it. Túrin, lowering his hand, stared in awe at his guest. 

“You are always free to choose one of the valar to follow,” Melian taught her heir. “It was not only given to Sauron to change his path. You do not have to leave the gift in the form in which it was given.” She paused, watching Túrin’s broad smile at the innocent life in his hand. “But if you want to, I think Vána would be glad to have you.”

Vána was life renewed, no matter how much death. She was innocence, not in the absence of death but because of it. And she had taken their side against Varda and ‘Námo,’ demonstrating a compassion so few of her kin had. Yes, she would suit.

“I do want that,” said Túrin, “very much.”

Then he raised his hand to the sky, and set his charge free.

**Author's Note:**

> Warning that is spoiler-y: Implied future character death, but NOT of Túrin. 
> 
> So, that. In the /original/ version of Aranya, months and months ago, Túrin actually became a maia on the battlefield with Fëanor, and was a little more helpful in fighting Morgoth, but for a lot of reasons, I like this one a lot better. In the end, I think he needed to reclaim his humanity before he could be anything else. Also, I always fucking love writing Finduilas so that was a plus.


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